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Functional Capacity Evaluations
A Functional Capacity Evaluation (FCE) documents a client's current ability to perform work from a medical, behavioral, physical, and ergonomic perspective.
A Functional Capacity Evaluation (FCE) documents a client's current ability to perform work from a medical, behavioral, physical, and ergonomic perspective. The FCE is flexible enough to meet the needs of a wide variety of patient populations. The FCE will help to measure work readiness and provide baseline information for successful rehabilitation, as well as safe guidelines leading to attainment of gainful employment. The FCE will therefore be an important asset in formulation of realistic work goals. The FCE is also an essential tool that will provide documentation required to resolve disability issues.
Benefits of an FCE
The FCE provides many benefits. For the client, it identifies safe working limits, accelerates the return to work process, and improves the chance of successful rehabilitation.
For the physician, it assists with evaluation of medical impairments, provides a baseline for successful rehabilitation, and establishes safe physical demands for the return to work.
For the compensation carrier, it validates the injury, helps to document data for disability settlement, and helps to resolve one's case.
For the employer, it provides faster return to work, and gives data regarding ergonomic solutions and job modifications.
For the attorney, it gives objective data for establishment of functional status.
Overall, the FCE includes multiple tests that focus on strength, flexibility, lifting, pushing, pulling, bending, and manipulatory tasks. The FCE is flexible, depending on the client's situation. For example, a job specific FCE is designed to closely simulate a job that a client will return to, or performed at the time of injury. It is done when a specific skill or physical demand is in question, and can screen for conditions that may place the worker at risk. A generic FCE can be done when there is no specific job designated to return to.
An FCE usually takes four hours. However, in certain situations, an FCE can be completed in as little as one hour if only a small number of tasks needs to be observed. For example, establishment of baseline information for lifting, carrying, pushing, and pulling can be completed in a one hour test. The evaluation is performed by either an occupational or physical therapist. The following is a general outline for an FCE. Though the evaluations are individualized, they typically include:
- Intake Interview: Information obtained regarding medical history, general health, mechanism of injury, job description, and vocational goals. Information on pain, effect on activities of daily living, and psychological impact of injury is gathered.
- Musculoskeletal Evaluation: This provides insight into understanding of the client's behavior during the functional evaluation. It includes evaluation of range of motion, strength, sensation, and volumetric measurements. It may provide clues to possible symptom magnification. For example, static strength testing, as done with the Jamar Hand Dynamometer, can assist with determining consistency of effort.
- Physical Demand Testing: This is the "meat and potatoes" of the evaluation. The evaluator observes the client in using the involved part and whole body in tasks. Both standardized and non standardized tests can be used. Non standardized tests are used to obtain data about the client's participation in critical demands of a job.
- Material Handling: This determines a client's ability to exert force in order to move items. This includes lifting, carrying, pushing, and pulling. Lifting to and from various heights can be tested with the EPIC lift station. Pushing and pulling capacities are usually tested with a sled. The evaluator can then match the client to one of five categories as determined by the U.S. Department of Labor for the respective task. The categories are sedentary, light, medium, heavy, or very heavy. Therefore, material handling tasks will determine if a client meets the strength requirements for work tasks in question.
- Non Material Handling: This includes, but is not limited to, tasks requiring bending, crawling, kneeling, squatting, and climbing ladders. These include any tasks that do not require a significant amount of force.
- General Conditioning: This may include walking and stair climbing endurance in order to ascertain overall aerobic capacity.
- Specific Job Simulation: Examples include participation in clerical, housekeeping, patient care, and law enforcement job components.
- Psychological Factors: There are several tests that can give insight into a client's behavior. For example, placebo tests can determine if a client is a symptom magnifier. The Spinal Functional Sort is a test of perceived level of capability. With this test, we can assess if perceived level of capability matches actual level of capacity.
Upon completion of a full FCE, a report is generated. This report includes a summary of the client's assets and limitations in regard to work potential. Recommendations will provide safe guidelines for return to work, rehabilitation, and case resolution. For short FCE's that last one hour, a physical capacities form can be completed that will generate information on general material and non material handling abilities. This will also assist with safe rehabilitation, work potentials, and case resolution.
All FCE's are performed at our Riverfront location. To inquire about FCE's including rates and scheduling, please call 215 218 3900.


text:
It's hard to keep secrets. What's the fun of knowing something only you know? You gotta tell someone, let somebody knows how special you are for having a secret, and how special the other person is if you decided to share that secret with him/her.
At the same time, we do comic books and, as such distinguish creators, we practically live in a cave when we're working, so while we're actually working, it's very easy to work and keep it secret. Comic book artists are crazy scientists creating time machines or interdimentional portals inside their studios, and at some point in the story, we reach the moment for that surprise turnaround scene where we see the scientists actually built two machines instead of one.
We've reached that moment.
We started doing this two months ago, when we were thinking about our convention trips to NYCC in New York, CRACK BANG BOOM in Rosario, Argentina, and Rio Comicon in Rio de Janeiro. We realized we didn't want to go to three conventions in three different countries where three different languages were spoken and have nothing that could be presented, read and understood at all three. We travel to talk about comics and to meet the readers, sure, but the primary point of interest in the comic's world is the work, and we wanted to have work to show (we always want to have work to show and stories to tell). In the spur of the moment, we decided that, in one month, we could crank out a new comic that by the power of comics could work in three different languages, and if we could finish it in a month, we could send it to the printer and have in ready in time for our first stop: New York.
One month later, we were calling the printer to check out if they got the files.
What else can I say?
It's at the printer, and should be ready any moment now. And then it will be real, in my hands, and soon enough. in yours. That's how's supposed to work, and it's the beauty of it. We've just built another time machine and it's time to put it to work. Can you feel the turning point coming?
Now, it's great to have friends, specially if they're in the crazy scientist profession like ourselves, because it's always better, when you're alone at night drawing endlessly and with little to no hope, to know that, if you look through the window at the tower of your friend's castle, lightening bolts and explosions can be seen, heard and felt, and you know that, by the time you finish your monster, there will be a monster friend to keep it company.
As we pack and get ready to travel with our new comic, we know that we'll be in great company as we saw our friend Gustavo Duarte produce his second comic, also in the dead of night, also in secret (not really, but let's keep playing our roles), and also in time for NYCC, where he'll share a table with us to present the world TAXI, his brand new thing. Let me tell you, it's beautiful, but don't believe me and go see for yourself.
We'll be at table F4-F9 on a giant booth at artist's alley, along with Ivan Brandon, Rafael Albuquerque, Ariel Olivetti, Andy MacDonald, Leandro Fernández and the incredible Becky Cloonan. we'll have copies of ATELIER, CASANOVA, and stuff. Fun stuff. Check it out.
See you in a week, or in another convention, or soon.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
ATELIER and the time machines
Posted by Fábio Moon at 4:25 PM 4 comments
Labels: Atelier, comics, conventions, CRACK BANG BOOM, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Bá, Gustavo Duarte, NYCC, Rio Comicon, Taxi
Friday, September 24, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Come out, come out and let us play.
I love comics.
First I'd like to thank all the attention and love we've been getting about Daytripper. This comics really has gone further than we predicted and we couldn't be happier with it.
And I couldn't be happier with the projects I've been working on. Each one different from the other, the creators are exciting to work with and I learn new things about our craft every day. Casanova is coming out in color and it looks amazing, the new letters look great too. I've begun working on the new material and it's like time travel back to crazy land.
But the most exciting thing about the upcoming days is actually we will stop working for 3 weeks just to do the only thing that give us as much joy as creating a new story: going to comic conventions and meeting the public.
Our entire carreer has been filled with a lot of trips to comic conventions, waiting in lines, watching panels, meeting creators and talking to the fellow authors we admire. And the more we produce, more we have to talk about, so the last conventions have been a full plate. And that's the way we like.
Two weeks from now, we'll go to New York Comic Con for the first time and we're really excited about that. We'll be sharing a huge set of tables with IVAN BRANDON, BECKY CLOONAN, ANDY MACDONALD, ARIEL OLIVETTI (Argentina) , LEANDRO FERNÁNDEZ (Argentina), RAFAEL ALBUQUERQUE (Brasil), and GUSTAVO DUARTE (Brasil). We'll be on Artist Alley on tables F4 through F9. Can't wait to talk to whoever stops by.
Two weeks after that, we cross the globe to go to CRACK BANG BOOM, the first international comics convention of Rosário, Argentina. That will be awesome! And finally, in november we have Rio Comicon in... well, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
We have a lot of books on our bags, we'll have original pages and we'd really like to talk about comics and stuff, be it in english, portuguese or spanish. But the language that unite us all, that has been taking us all over the word, that has no frontiers or boundaries is the one of panels and balloons.
Come meet us on one of these conventions and discover what we have to say about that.
Posted by Bá at 6:13 PM 2 comments
Labels: comics, CRACK BANG BOOM, Daytripper, historieta, HQ, NYCC, Quadrinhos, Rio Comicon

subset: commoncrawl


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What is it about pornography that makes it so appealing to so many men?
Neuroscientist and researcher Dr. William M. Struthers explores that question in a new book, where he approaches the pervasive problem of pornography as not only a spiritual matter but also a physical one.
"Pornography is ... a physical matter, rooted in the biological intricacies of our sexual design," Struthers, associate professor of psychology at Wheaton College, writes in Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain. "In my opinion, nowhere is the complexity of our sexual nature seen more than in the wiring of the brain."
While acknowledging that women are increasingly becoming consumers of pornography, the biopsychologist says there's little doubt that it is primarily men who are hooked on it. Even among Christian men, surveys have found that half of them are struggling with pornography.
"Men seem to be wired in such a way that pornography hijacks the proper functioning of their brains and has a long-lasting effect on their thoughts and lives," he states.
Struthers began writing the book after he taught an upper-division psychology class called Men and Addictions. One of the addictions he addressed was pornography. The Wheaton professor would soon find his office filled with college-aged men from the Christian college who confided their addiction and inability to stop consuming pornography.
"The simplest explanation for why men view pornography ... is they are driven to seek out sexual intimacy," he writes. "Satisfying this drive is pleasurable. Sexual intercourse and the naked form of women are enjoyable, as designed by God to be."
He notes that men are reflexively drawn to the content of pornographic material.
It's like HD television. Just as standard television signals differ from HD signals, pornographic images are inherently different from other signals, Struthers explains.
"The male brain is built like an ideal pornography receiver, wired to be on the alert for these images of nakedness," he lays out. "The male brain and our conscious visual experience is the internal monitor where we perceive them. The images of sexuality grab our attention, jumping out and hypnotizing a man like an HD television among a sea of standard televisions."
Constant exposure to pornographic images, however, comes with major consequences, especially for men.
"The way that a male brain is organized in being one-track, goal-oriented and visuospatial (mentally manipulating objects) make it the perfect playground for sexual fantasy," he cautions.
"As men fall deeper into the mental habit of fixating on these images, the exposure to them creates neural pathways," the professor explains. "Neural paths become wider as they are repeatedly traveled with each exposure to pornography. ...They become the automatic pathway through which interactions with women are routed.
"Every woman they come into contact with is objectified, undressed and evaluated as a willing (or unwilling) mental sexual partner."
Though acknowledging the biological nature of the male brain, Struthers says "my brain made me do it" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. In other words, it's not an excuse for sin.
Pornography, he says, dishonors the image of God in an individual by treating him or her as a sexual object to be consumed directly or indirectly.
A man with a properly oriented conscience and filled with the Spirit values the image of God in women and has trained his mind to take sexual thoughts captive, the author highlights. Meanwhile, pornography creates moral and emotional confusion that prevents the man from finding fulfillment in the manner he is created (by God) to find it.
Struthers encourages men to use knowledge of how a male's brain is wired to rewire it and to move toward sanctification.
"The process of sanctification is an addiction to holiness, a compulsive fixation on Christ and an impulsive pattern of compassion, virtue and love. This is what we are wired for."